Why Christopher Nolan Cut a 3,000-Year-Old Joke From ‘The Odyssey’

If there’s one thing Christopher Nolan‘s movies are known for, it’s their sense of humor.

Okay, so that’s entirely untrue. Nolan’s movies are hugely dramatic, cinematic and thrilling — among many other things — but funny? Not really (aside from the occasional smattering of dry, rather British, wit).

Still, Nolan wanted to get a famous joke from Homer’s The Odyssey into his epic adaptation which opens this week, but he couldn’t quite make it work.

The joke is considered one of the oldest puns in the Western literary canon, a nearly 3,000-year-old gag.

In an interview on The Daily Show (watch it here), host Jon Stewart gushed about Nolan’s film, calling it “staggering” along with plenty of other praise. Stewart said he saw the film with a Daily Show writer who has studied the original Greek text.

“This is a person that would probably be a bit of a pain in the ass to watch The Odyssey with,” Stewart said. “[The person] loved [the movie but] had one note…

“Okay, it’s a little late,” Nolan gamely quipped (hey, there’s some of that dry British wit).

“Apparently, there is a joke that Odysseus makes with the Cyclops,” Stewart said. “He was very upset that was not in the movie.

“I understand,” Nolan said. “It’s a pun. Puns in translation are tough. I tried. It was not possible to work in it.”

So here’s the joke.

(This contains very minor spoilers from the Cyclops scene for those who haven’t read the original text.)

In Homer’s version, the clever Odysseus (Matt Damon in the film) encounters the murderous Cyclops in his cave. Odysseus first tells the creature his name is “Nobody” (Outis in Greek). Later, when Odysseus drives a stake into the Cyclops’ eye, the creature screams for help and other Cyclopes come running. Asked who is attacking him, the Cyclops cries that “Nobody” is doing it — so the others misunderstand him and leave. Like with the Trojan Horse, giving a fake name was a trick that pays off later.

There is additional wordplay with the pun later on, but you really have to get knee-deep into the original Greek to make the jokes work.

Speaking of the Trojan Horse, the sequence marked a significant departure from the traditional depiction, and all for the better. As shown in the trailer, Odysseus and his men leave the horse half-submerged on the beach rather than outside the gates of Troy on wheels, looking like an obvious ruse.

“I was briefly attached to direct Troy — the film that David Benioff had written based on The Iliad,” Nolan said. “I came up with this idea of the horse half buried in the sand, about to be destroyed or carried away by the waves. So that when the Trojans find it, the last thing it looks like — there’s no wheels, it doesn’t look like something that’s meant to be carried into the city. That image stuck with me for decades. How can we present this to an audience in a way that they can believe it? And that became the mantra for everybody on the film with every sequence. People want to go on this journey with us. Let’s give them a reason to believe.”

Said an impressed Stewart, “I guess what I’m saying is: Homer ain’t got shit on you.”

The Odyssey tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his long, perilous journey home from the Trojan War to the kingdom of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and loyal servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) await his return. Along the way, he encounters mythic figures including the goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) and the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), while Penelope is pursued by the treacherous suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson). The film opens this week.